Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

No doubt about how she came into my apartment the first time, the tenderness at last if not at first. She asked if my body was anesthetized. She found my giant Spanish table with the abandoned treadle built into its lower structure; and she found the brass bed (worth twelve hundred dollars) halfway polished as it stayed for two months; and she found the barstools at the breakfast nook, and found "all these books, Luce!" and found a square, delicate Harvard chair my father bought years after he had graduated and six months before he died, and a tall, noble Windsor chair my mother when she visits from Santa Fe sits in resolutely as if she would take it back, instead of me. Yes, Maureen came in and found my whole godawful history wound up between my shoulder and the root of my strong neck, when I was "dying" of cigarettes, first smoking them, then now not smoking them. Tenderness? It lived in her fingertips when her mind was dreaming. Other times, hardly to be seen when she was talking power, her tenderness might have been nestling in the arms of her Leader.

Oh well, the German word is too close, and her Leader was even less fascist than some of those who are casually called fascist nowadays. When you’ve had a lover who was a political economist — a real love — you get fussy about such things. But who was more fussy than Maureen? — though I don’t mean the sound of her voice coming, nor her saying not quite softly, "Go round and round in a very small circle, that’s all, and then I’ll tell you what happens after that." I mean about words: like "discrimination" could never mean deciding subtly between ideas; and "energy" could never be questioned, I mean as a word, because we all knew what it meant.

She showed me all over again that I had nipples. She found my feet as if I had lost them in their charge of tension. She told me how she had felt at ten wearing a T-shirt to school in Florida and getting sore. I mean she would talk endlessly about her body, the quality of her gums if she went a day without eating a grapefruit, the number of days she might go without taking a shit, how to brush your teeth (though one day when I thought What the hell, we’ll talk about this, then, why she closed the subject as soon as I opened my mouth), the hint of past surplus along her lower back, the exact feel of pubic hair growing back in, how her insteps felt when she came with a man, with a woman, or alone, or — but orgasm was good or better because of how you managed things. It came from the Leader’s talk, though Maureen always went a bit further. I had known that I had nipples and in a sense I did not need to be reminded, and I speak of it here because sex for all the talk and activity in those years when the War was winding down and our aging parents, retired beyond climatic change, would rather not think about what was going on in our lives, and Mr. N. (wasn’t it?) was in the Situation Room taping crises (though I have been told there are no situations, only people!), what I found coming for me from Maureen was not mainly sex, and so the lullaby of her hand on my chest — my breast — seemed mostly deeply loving, though I would add that it also turned me on.

I put this down in a notebook helter skelter like a letter, and why write words after all if not to somebody?

And if you believe, and even if the revolution had already happened, why not take your position with regard to other people: it may not mean they will take your advice, but they won’t go running all over you — right, Maureen, dear? And so Maureen, in the last days of this that I am getting to, would urge me to take a workshop; would even tell me her adored Leader had advised the same, while I added that there are no neutral messages and why was Maureen carrying messages from that star-quality teacher (whom I already knew) to me?

Once I stayed in Maureen’s apartment overnight — not what she wanted from me or from sex — and when I left early in the a.m. finding brief instructions on where to find a bag of whole-grain cereal and to drink from one of the jars of juice in the refrigerator rather than operate the juicer myself (as if I ever would have), I gave in to some silly tenderness of mine and left Maureen a note saying just, "Thanks, Maureen. You’re lovely. I loved being here." And later in the day wondered if that was going too far.

In public the twice I involved myself in all that supposed openness, she was so noisy when she came, so joyfully hard in her spasmodic calls that she could have been being raped — it was like work, or it was too much like the high of a lunatic hooked onto what wasn’t in the end known, though not the wftknown. But then with me one time she did come, and in all those quick breaths like contraction control, then some soft long breaths even before she let go that last private wonder and laughed and I did, too, but I knew it was real and I had felt it in the muscles of her buttocks that must have been drained of all fatty tissue by lecithin or God knows what recent compound. But it wasn’t me supposedly; it was her being (as the Leader said) responsible for her orgasm. Yet the Leader was something else, and I would not pretend to sum her up except that she enjoyed her life enormously and if she, as she used to say in her own famous words, "ran the fuck" (with whoever), and if it was a little on the Olympic side of lust, she was fun and preferred a longdistance variety of body trips to the usual.

I put this down in a notebook but why write words after all if not to someone? Which is anesthesia? Which is waking truth? There came a day when I thought all I wanted was Maureen’s well-being. She came in to see me on her way home, for she was by then living in the building — but not because I lived there, rather because her Leader did. And she said she had had a date with this guy out in Brooklyn — well, the Heights, which is not "out" so much as over the bridge — and he had lived there since his mother had dropped him out of the carriage on his head on a curb of Garden Place in about 1935; and when I said, Did it go O.K., and Maureen said, I gave him what he wanted, and he gave me what he was able to, I laughed and said, But that happens with women, too. But Maureen said, Oh Luce, you take things too personally, you work too hard, you’re afraid of pleasure, you’re work-addicted, you go so far but not far enough into freedom.

I know, I know, I said, I’ve heard all that before, but you can’t think that work’s a chosen pleasure because you and your mother-superior have discovered that some people get baffled and anxious when they’re having a ball.

Maureen got mad, called me compulsive, work-addicted—

— That’s you, I said.

— compulsively lazy, she said — and I felt that I was her other parent, then. And it came to me as if I had left it and come back to it — an idea as solid as a silver money clip (we do not — we have decided not to — carry bills in our wallets any more) — that what I wanted from Maureen was not her passion but her well-being.

But in the excitement of those days, I did not shrug off all that blind talk of addiction, and though Maureen might say I was work-addicted and as with my nipples and my recently very hard-rubbed scalp had not yet begun to discover my body, I would hook into the provincial evangelism of their thinking and remonstrate angrily that addictions were all the same, and being in love was not a cocaine habit which Maureen’s Leader did not have but used — can you use a habit? — experimenting with that eight-foot-tall snuff ground out of that particular hard-to-capture mountain of our mind first thing in the morning to test its effect on her work, which, I tried (pissed off) to point out to Maureen, apparently did not come under the category of addiction. And before she could take the chance to speak, I went on, as if I didn’t want to keep her on the spot, and said Freedom was the issue of course but addiction was such a third-rate, banal way to reduce it, and she should let some of the poets tell her "Isn’t it time our loving freed us from the one we love."